PRISMA 2024 : EL CONDE DE TORREFIEL

TWILIGHT ZONES
El Conde de Torrefiel in the City of Roma

PRISMA 2024 is an expansive and refracted project involving different places across the City of Rome that this year offers a chance to enter the world of the Catalan theatre company El Conde de Torrefiel; founded by Tanya Beyeler and Pablo Gisbert, one of the most innovative groups on the international scene.

Twilight Zones collects a selection of works and performances by Beyeler and Gisbert, who experiment caustically on the porous border between reality and fiction, seeking to deviate from their assigned meanings. Their research has created an aesthetic that combines theatre, bodily scores, literature, sound exploration, and plastic arts, exploring the ambiguities of contemporary life. El Conde de Torrefiel’s theatre (dis)assembles the fourth wall, stratifies visual disturbances, unstitches the relationship between power relations and rationality, challenges the linearity of the timeline, removes the actor to shape the action, disturbs the meanings set by language, and creates storytelling trajectories that highlight debatable aspects.

A theatre made of absences, latencies, and sudden surfacings, where words and sounds play a fundamental role in questioning the foundations of the image in theatre. The focus on the plastic and material quality of imagination falls in the twilight zones where the perceived and the imagined share a soft and malleable space. They are ways to reinvent reality. Fiction summons a dimension that can be tragic, comic, shameless or domesticated. It’s openly pretending up to the critical point, like a “dough” that is continuously kneaded to stimulate the spectator’s senses.

El Conde de Torrefiel will be present throughout the 2024 edition: with a soundwalk that dramatizes the Monumental Cemetery of Verano; a performance for one spectator at a time at the Teatro Cometa Off, reflecting on the primal artifice of theatre, on the implication of seeing and being seen; a masterclass for artists and performers held in at the Laboratori dei Cerchi of the Teatro dell’Opera di Roma, on the porosity of physical and mental spaces; a public talk at the Real Academia de España en Roma to explore their aesthetics and politics; an atmospheric, performative event embracing words, sounds, ambient noises of the environment, grasslands, animals, and fluids, set along the banks of the Tiber as the sunset transitions into evening.